Hi Thomas, make sure to take the survey to make your position known. Personally (and I'm not speaking for Oracle in this context), I'd like to see unsafe remain accessible in its current form so that sophisticated users can continue to make good use of it.

FWIW, on the JRuby project we have been using a "mock" Unsafe to allow compiling in newer features. We then choose whether to use those features based on JVM version at runtime, rather than anchoring our codebase to the lowest common denominator.